When I was growing up in the early 90s, Lent marked the transition to spring, and spring meant my family’s annual pilgrimage to the town library to check out Jesus Christ Superstar on VHS. Ecstatic, my siblings and I would dance in the living room for the rock opera’s full hour and 48 minutes, half a dozen kids in various states of underwear and madness, all tranced out and grooving. My siblings liked the soundtrack, but I loved it. I loved it with the kind of full-bodied intensity peculiar to children under the age of ten, especially the freaky little anxious ones.
The music of Jesus Christ Superstar moved me in a way Catholic mass was supposed to but never did. It was sensual, it was physical, and it suggested the sour sweat smell of strife and real life. The story line loosely follows the last week of Christ’s life, according to the Gospels of Luke, Matthew, Mark, and John, and prioritizes passion and psychological complexity over religious dogma. The original concept album was released in 1970, and the film adaptation followed in 1973—funk was at its mainstream peak, and these songs are soaked in it.
Lanky multiracial dancers in lilac leotards and dusty bell-bottoms hop out of a bus in the middle of the Israeli desert to jut and shake. Deliciously bitchy priests sing with what appear to be flowerpots on their heads and bondage straps on their chests. Mary Magdalene, no longer a parable or a whisper but real at last, is played as Christ’s lover—a sweet hippie beauty with power lurking underneath her kind face—by Japanese American singer-songwriter Yvonne Elliman. Each guitar lick, each bright streak of string, set my body aflame and my mind wandering toward God.
But it was Judas Iscariot, portrayed by Black American actor and singer Carl Anderson as a frowning, squinting, sharp-questioning revolutionary, who lit me up the most. He’s right there from the first song, “Heaven on Their Minds,” glowering alone atop a mountain as he hurls his voice down to Christ. The messiah-fication of his friend (“You’ve started to believe the things they say of you”) has begun to overshadow the freedom movement to which they both belong (“You’ve begun to matter more than the things you say!”). This could bring danger to them all. “We are occupied,” Anderson hisses, then, shockingly, roars. “Have you forgotten how put down we are?”
In this story, Judas is not the amoral, snake-hearted betrayer of God I understood him to be from catechism class. He’s sullen, passionate, and self-righteous. He loathes hypocrisy and is obsessed with keeping his people safe. He has a sweaty forehead and powerful pipes, and he wears a red embroidered tunic slit down to his waist. I was all-in.
In my bed under our bungalow’s slanted eaves, I fantasized about what it’d be like to be Judas-as-Carl Anderson. (In my child brain they were one, the same way Indiana Jones was Harrison Ford and also absolutely real. I wanted to be Indiana too, but I couldn’t imagine a way to do that—I settled for imagining I was his wife.) What would it be like to sing like Judas, sway like him? Publicly express rage and despair? Descend from on high in a white leotard and fringe during the musical’s penultimate number to steal the show from the Crucifixion?
I’d think about it at school too, sometimes while swinging on the monkey bars, imagining with such intensity that the sounds of the real world dropped away and I could almost see it: me able to open my maw and pour out the best singing voice my classmates had ever heard; me center stage with a backup chorus of haughty angels in knee-high boots and white wigs that trembled with each kick and thrust. The parents at Southwest Elementary Family Fun Fest, I thought, wouldn’t know what hit ’em.
Like Judas in the musical, I was hyperfocused on how to keep the people I loved safe, and consumed by questions of Right or Wrong, Good or Bad. I figured that everything and everyone would be OK if I just knew what the rules were and stuck to them. By the beginning of fourth grade, these traits of mine had fused into religious OCD: for a while, I said the rosary every night, starting over if my mind strayed, if I forgot a word, or if I had an impure thought.
Because one Lenten prayer said something about kissing a crucifix, I believed I had to kiss every cross I saw, including the black shadows of branches, crossed and waving, cast by streetlight onto my bedroom wall. Before I slept, I had to pray for each person in my family by name and mention something specific about them, beginning again each time I lost focus for even a fleeting moment. Under no circumstances could I relax enough to let my parents leave the house without muttering under my breath, “Don’t die in a car crash.” Failing to do this would not only be a sin—it would also lead to the deaths of everyone I loved, deaths that would be my fault.
It meant a good deal to me that Judas, in his tight white bodysuit with fringe suggestive of wings, came down from heaven for the final number—rather than up from hell. It affirmed the musical’s sympathetic portrayal of him and what I suspected in my baby bones. Judas the revolutionary, Judas the narrator surging with a powerful combination of love and despair, Judas the jealous zealot with his inflexible ideas of right and wrong, Judas who loved Christ but loved being right and playing it safe for the people he loved even more: he had tried his best, in his way, to be good.
Early in Jesus Christ Superstar, there’s a number called “Everything’s Alright” that starts as a lullaby and ends with a prophecy of death. It’s twilight, and the apostles are settling down for the evening in some surprisingly cozy-looking caves. Mary Magdalene, in love with Jesus, senses some of the enormous weight resting on his shoulders, even if she doesn’t know exactly what it is. She offers to rub his feet with ointment. Judas, sulking in the dark, interrupts.
Woman, your fine ointment, brand-new and expensive
Should have been saved for the poor
Why has it been wasted? We could have raised maybe
Three hundred silver pieces or more
People who are hungry, people who are starving
They matter more than your feet and hair!
The song begins aimed at Mary Magdalene, but Judas knows Jesus is listening. By the end, it’s become the first public fracture between these two movement leaders and close comrades (“I’ve been your right-hand man all along,” a frustrated Judas reminds Christ in an earlier song), as they begin to realize just how deeply they disagree about the best way to get their people free.
Judas also raises a great question! Even as a kid, playing a made-up game with my brothers called Lava Monster and still secretly sucking my thumb, I felt its righteousness. My family checked out Jesus Christ Superstar from the library because it was free. We were poor, and I knew it. Why did Christ accept this precious gift? Didn’t it contradict what he preached, when so much of the gospel specifically raised up the righteousness of class warfare and the need to redistribute wealth? I understood Judas’s anger at what he saw as hypocrisy; I didn’t have the words for it, but I too longed for material change. I’d had enough of prayer.
Ted Neeley, a white Texan with a rock scream better than Robert Plant’s, plays Jesus with the hot, despairing intensity of someone who knows he was born to die. His fatalism isn’t peaceful, and Neeley-as-Jesus’s colossal, hair-raising wails in “Gethsemane” later make that clear (“Why should I die? Oh why should I die? Can you show me now that I would not be killed in vain?”). But Jesus is taking the long view here—easier to do, perhaps, when your perspective of time is as long as the universe is wide, and when you know that God is real and so is the afterlife.
In “Everything’s Alright,” Jesus’s answer to Judas’s question starts out low:
Surely you’re not saying we have the resources
To save the poor from their lot?
There will be poor always, pathetically struggling
Look at the good things you’ve got!
Then, suddenly, Jesus cups Judas’s chin, cradling his beloved’s face. Their eyes meet.
Think! While you still have me
Move! While you still see me
You’ll be lost, you’ll be so sorry when I’m gone!
Like Judas, Jesus wrestles with his own doubts about the course he’s on, and both men agonize over whether Jesus’s death will really serve a purpose. And yet Jesus recognizes that huge, systemic change takes time, and that the seeds of his teachings and actions might not bear fruit until long after they’re fertilized by his death.
Judas wants his people free, here on earth and still alive. He worries that Christ, with his growing power and visibility, is endangering them all, but he’s also growing disillusioned with his friend for not being revolutionary enough. Christ, in Judas’s eyes, has settled on his savior-martyr role. Judas doesn’t want to die for a cause; he wants to lie low and keep working to redistribute the wealth.
“Everything’s Alright” ends with the two men gripping each other’s hands as they realize they will, inevitably, need to let go. It’s a gorgeous, terrible moment. Mary Magdalene rushes in to soothe them both. Her imploring voice is raised up by a chorus of unnamed women who join her in peacekeeping and tending to the men—as so often happens in radical circles, regardless of how leftist and egalitarian a movement claims to be.
As I grew up, the focus with which I imagined myself performing Superstar softened, but I’d be lying if I said it went away. I’m still moved by all of it, and still by Judas most of all. Obviously his character has traits I identify with: stubbornness and rigidity about the Right Thing to Do; frequent inability to give up the pursuit of the perfect in order to embrace the reality of the good (or good enough); resting mutiny face. I don’t think I’d collaborate with the police to execute a comrade I thought was going off the rails, but I do know a bit about deals with the devil, and there have been times in my life I would’ve given up anything to keep my family safe.
To this day, it’s Anderson’s voice I want in my earbuds when I run for miles every spring; it’s Judas’s songs I put on when I’m struggling with how to be the courageous, questioning person I thought I could be when I first heard him more than 25 years ago. Jesus Christ Superstar matters to me in a different way as an adult: When the stakes are as high as the freedom of the oppressed and the salvation of humankind, when do you compromise? And when do you refuse to bend? The story is driven by the music’s attention to the tension present in every group of people working for change, whether they’re trying to agree on what to fight for in a union contract or arguing about tactics to dismantle America’s carceral state.
In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as the Word, and in Jesus Christ Superstar, he has the last word. But it’s Judas who has the last song: to deliver “Superstar,” he comes down from heaven, dripping white and silver, one hand open wide, the other coolly holding the tail of a shooting star. The last time he was onstage, we saw Judas grasp the consequences of his terrible betrayal and wrestle with his own fatalism (“Was I just a pawn in your story?” he sing-shouts to the heavens). Sweating and sobbing, he hangs himself from a tree. So it’s a relief to see him shining and looking so good. But it’s still the same Judas, frowning like he has an ice cream headache and wagging his finger.
Did you mean to die like that?
Was that a mistake or
Did you know your messy death
Would be a record breaker?
As the song continues, scenes of Jesus carrying the cross to Golgotha are interspersed with visions of Judas and the angels wailing and rocking on a stage set like a night sky. The effect leaves the viewer with the impression that Judas is now Christ’s guardian angel, keeping his old friend and comrade company in his own prickly way.
The musical might not be perfect, but this song is. As in life, Judas in heaven is still doubting, still critical, but there’s less anger in him now and more wonder. Singing, Judas asks Jesus upward of 30 questions. “Who are you? What have you sacrificed? (I only wanna know.)” In between righteous hip slinging, he’s begging for understanding, for knowledge—and for intimacy. As the angels groove, Jesus keeps grimly stumbling forward, sweat and blood on his skin. We’re back to the music of turmoil and doubt that was present in the beginning, only now one man is dead and the other about to die.
So where does the musical leave us? What’s changed? Judas’s final song abruptly cuts off, and in its place blares an ambient haze of horror: the sound of jeering people gathered to watch an execution. Surrounded by a crowd that includes distraught apostles and a screaming Mary Magdalene, Christ is the most alone he’s ever been, for only he can endure his final agony.
Like Judas, Jesus expresses doubt about the purpose of his death even as he’s dying (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”), but his final words are ones of acceptance, faith, and hope. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” It is done; what his sacrifice will mean for his movement, and for the people he loved and who loved him back, will only be evident in the days and centuries to come.
I’m no longer religious, but I still see doubt as a testimony of faith. Criticism of others in a movement or group, without self-reflection and a willingness to stick your own neck out, is just annoying. But doubt is holy, for it demonstrates a desire for understanding, reconciliation, and change. Doubt is part of any commitment to being just, because it’s a commitment to growth over comfort, to the stubborn effort to bridge contradictions and air out conflict.
The tragedy of Jesus Christ Superstar to me isn’t Christ’s death, as moving as it is, because he chose it. He lived out his convictions—including when he wrestled with the agony of his own questions—until the end. The tragedy is that these two men, whose story ends with betrayal and death, loved each other as deeply as they loved their people. Judas couldn’t move beyond their ideological difference, so he made a choice, a terrible one, with hope in his bitter heart.
The post Judas Christ Superstar: Easter thoughts on being just appeared first on Chicago Reader.